Education

Kristen Ghodsee earned her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and has been teaching at Bowdoin since 2002. Her research interests include the gendered effects of the economic transition from communism to capitalism and the ethnographic study of postcommunist nostalgia in Eastern Europe. Primarily focusing on the southeast European country of Bulgaria, Ghodsee has spent over fifteen years examining the impacts of the transition process on the lives of ordinary men and women. Her early ethnographic research focused on women’s labor in the postsocialist Bulgarian tourism industry and on the effects of political transition on Bulgaria’s Muslim minorities, particularly the Pomaks (or Slavic Muslims). Her later works have been heavily influenced by humanistic anthropology; Ghodsee has experimented with ethnographic fiction, autoethnography, and photoethnography to produce more intimate narratives and images of the disorienting impacts of the collapse of communism on daily life.

Kristen Ghodsee is the author of five books and over two dozen articles, including The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke University Press, 2005) and Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press 2010), which won the 2010 Barbara Heldt Book Prize, the 2011 John D. Bell Book Prize, the 2011 Harvard Davis Center Book Prize, and the 2011 William Douglass Prize for Best Book in Europeanist Anthropology. She is also the co-author of Professor Mommy: Finding Work/Family Balance in Academia(Rowman & Littlefield, 2011) and Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the 2011 Ethnographic Fiction Prize from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (for the short story “Tito Trivia”). Her most recent monograph is The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2015.

Her research in Eastern Europe has been supported by: the National Science Foundation (NSF), Fulbright Foundation, the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Kristen Ghodsee has also won residential research fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany; the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Peer-Reviewed Jounral Articles

“A Tale of Two Totalitarianisms: The Crisis of Capitalism and the Historical Memory of Communism,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History, 4(2), Fall 2014: 115-142

“Pressuring the Politburo: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women's Movement and State Socialist Feminism," Slavic Review, 73(3), Fall 2014: 538-562

"Research Note: The historiographical challenges of exploring Second World-Third World alliances in the international women's movement," Global Social Policy, 14(2), 2014: 244-264

“Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and the United Nations Decade for Women, 1975–1985,” Journal of Women’s History, (24)4, Winter 2012: 49-73.

“Decentering Agency in Feminist Theory: Social Democracy, Postsocialism, and the Re-engagement of the Social Good” with Amy Borovoy, Women’s Studies International Forum, 35 (2012): 153-165.

“Starting a Family at Your Parent’s House: Multigenerational Households and Below Replacement Fertility in Bulgaria” with Laura Bernardi, Journal of Comparative Family Studies. Special Issue 2012, 43(3); 439-459

“The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: UNESCO, Communism, and the World Bank,” with Charles Dorn, Diplomatic History, 36(2) 2011: 373-398 (Winner of the 2012 Best Article Prize from the History of Education Society)

"Socialist Secularism: Gender, Religion and Modernity in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, 1946-1989” with Pam Ballinger, Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History, Vol. 5: 6-27

“Minarets after Marx: Islam, Communist Nostalgia and the Common Good in Post-socialist Bulgaria,” East European Politics and Societies, 24(4) 2010: 520-542.

“Revisiting the International Decade for Women: Brief Reflections on Competing Definitions of Feminism and Cold War Politics from the American Perspective,” Women’s Studies International Forum 33(1) 2010: 3-12.